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46 • ROCK products • July 2018 www.rockproducts.com
EQUIPMENT & TECHNOLOGY
MAINTENANCE & WEAR PARTS
Losing critical assets can be devastat-
ing, causing unplanned downtime that
can cost billions of dollars per year.
In order to be more proactive in pre-
venting these events, manufacturers
and industrial organizations are begin-
ning to schedule downtime events
by employing advanced technologies
and predictive maintenance. To help
identify and prevent downtime on crit-
ical assets, Rockwell Automation has
announced its Predictive Maintenance
as a service offering.
The service, which is applied on crit-
ical assets identified by the customer,
analyzes data from connected technol-
ogies, such as sensors, control systems
and smart machines. Leveraging Facto-
ryTalk Analytics and applying machine
learning technology, engineers from
Rockwell Automation can identify
normal operations and build out data
models to help predict, monitor for and
mitigate future failures or issues as part
of a preventive maintenance strategy.
"By building up that backlog of his-
torical data, we can start to see when
there might be issues down the road,"
said Phil Bush, remote monitoring and
analytics product manager, Rockwell
Automation. "This helps end-users focus
on solving the problem proactively and
minimizes the impact on production,
rather than waiting for something to fail
and trying to troubleshoot on the fly."
Prior to deploying a predictive main-
tenance solution, one Rockwell
Automation customer experienced a
bearing failure that resulted in more
than $3 million in costs related to main-
tenance and lost productivity. After
working with Rockwell Automation to
review over a year's worth of historical
data on the asset that failed, engineers
found that the bearing cooling system
had not been correctly operating for
six months. If a predictive maintenance
service had been deployed, the organi-
zation would have been able to identify
the bearing failure and its root cause
before the failure occurred.
This new service will be crucial in indus-
tries like the aggregates industry, where
the uptime of critical assets drives the
bottom line. This also includes critical
machines in continuous-manufactur-
ing operations. Additionally, OEMs can
implement the service on an asset and
use the predictive capability to pro-
vide better uptime performance scaled
across all similar customer assets.
Using this service provides customers
the ability to monitor predictions and
analyze details of an alert without need-
ing to build their own data models or
engineer their own solution. Rockwell
Automation delivers the data collection,
machine learning and engineering sup-
port to build the models, validate and
monitor patterns and predictions and
keep those models up to date as data
sets evolve.
Rockwell Automation Inc.,
www.rockwellautomation.com
Tsubaki Super Stainless Roller Chain Corrosion Resistant
The latest innovation from Wheeling,
Ill.-based U.S. Tsubaki Power Trans-
mission LLC is a revolutionary stainless
steel roller chain that has never been
seen before in this form. With more
than 100 years of design and manufac-
turing excellence, Tsubaki announced
the launch of its new Super Stainless
Steel roller chain.
Super Stainless chain is a unique
roller chain product that combines the
corrosion resistance and extreme tem-
perature operating range of Tsubaki's
AS series stainless steel chain with the
strength of a carbon steel chain.
Before this R&D breakthrough by Tsu-
baki, multiple stainless chains would
be required to provide the equivalent
strength of a similarly sized carbon
steel chain. This would also require
costly and time consuming equipment
redesigns in order to achieve compara-
ble working loads. Super Stainless can
now eliminate that need.
As an example, one #50 Super Stain-
less chain has a comparable maximum
allowable load (MAL) to one #50-6AS
(6-strand) roller chain.
Some of the new features of Super
Stainless chains include higher side-bar
waists for greater fatigue strength and
hardened pins and bushings for greater
bearing strength.
This revolutionary combination of
strength and corrosion resistances
allows for Super Stainless chain to fit
perfectly into applications where chains
are exposed to Parasitic Acids, tap
water, salt water, low-dosage caustics
and operating temperatures ranging
from -40F to 750 F.
Common applications where Tsubaki
Super Stainless chains will be an ideal
fit include underwater applications and
high-speed conveyors.
U.S. Tsubaki, www.ustsubaki.com
Predictive Maintenance as a Service
Helps Prevent Unplanned Downtime